On Tuesday, ReadWriteWeb hosted the second in a series of live chats on the changing nature of virtualized storage. We fielded questions on best practices for storage provisioning, reducing storage resources and dealing with low-bandwidth environments.
During the one-hour live chat we had Ruchi Goya, Steve Hindman, Eric Hennessey and John Cronin from Symantec. We also had a lot of questions from the audience and before the chat.
Reducing Resources
William Olmstead asked, “How will storage virtualization help me reduce my storage resources in my VMware environment?” Hindman responded that storage virtualization could help by combining resources for virtualized servers and desktops into fewer disks. Cronin added, “Space optimized snapshots can use storage more efficiently. For example, in a virtual desktop environment most of the OS images have largely the same bits. If we store 1,000 desktop images, we can save a lot of space if we only use one copy of the things that are the same and then store only the differences.”
Private Only
While a lot of us are using services like Dropbox for personal storage, there’s not much public cloud storage being used by enterprises. Audience member Chris asked for a breakdown of on-site storage versus cloud storage. Right now, says Hennessey, it’s almost all private storage. “Most of the customers I see are in the financial sector, and as such are pretty sensitive to confidentiality, so none I’ve spoken with are using public cloud services. Many, however, are deploying internal private storage clouds.”
Low Bandwidth
Several people were interested in cloud services in countries like Indonesia, where users might not have broadband access. Hindman said, “Application and desktop streaming technologies can provide access to cloud information over low-bandwidth networks. Symantec has an application streaming division as well as a number of other companies.”
Hennessey added, “I think that unfortunately we’ll see public storage clouds slow to catch on in those areas for reasons of performance. But who knows, maybe demand for these offerings will drive improvements in bandwidth.”
Polls
We also conducted several polls during the chat. We asked, for example, what people’s biggest concern was with storage: utilization, scaling capacity, availability, performance or the old standby “other.” Surprisingly, nobody said that utilization was a primary concern. Capacity and performance had 38% each, and availability came in at 25%. (The mathematically inclined may notice that adds up to 101%. Not sure how that works – but that’s the breakdown given by the live chat software.)
Two thirds of our audience said they’re not yet running VDI deployments, and 33% said they are. Why not? Costs and returns on investment (ROI) were tied at 29%, and security concerns and “too new” were at 14% each.
Finally, in what is likely to be good news for SSD manufacturers, 86% of the audience that answered said that they were considering SSD drives for better performance in virtualized environments.
Thanks much to everyone who attended and participated in this live chat. If you missed the chat, you can scroll through the log of the chat embedded here. We’ll be hosting another chat soon, so stay tuned for announcements on that. You can also find out more about Symantec and VMware’s partnership on the VMware website.
